The Mellons: Deindustrializing Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has shriveled. The former center of U.S. heavy industry has seen its population drop from 676,000 in 1950 to 310,000 in 2008. More people lived there in 1900.

So why are big shots from 20 countries—the G-20—meeting in Pittsburgh? The ruling class fears big demonstrations would erupt if the G-20 met in New York City or Washington, D.C.

Listen up billionaires. People will be marching in Pittsburgh for jobs and health care and against your wars in Iraq and Afghanistan no matter how many cops are mobilized.

The wealthy elite also chose Pittsburgh because they consider the hometown of the Mellon financial dynasty to be a shining example of a “post-industrial” city.

The Mellons and other billionaires destroyed over 110,000 manufacturing jobs in the area. Forty thousand factory jobs have been lost in the last 10 years alone.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six Super Bowls but the last big local mill is U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works, which Andrew Carnegie started in 1875. What had been known as the steel capital of the world shed 56,000 steel jobs.

Pittsburgh was also the center of the Westinghouse electrical empire. Thousands of jobs were lost at its former plants in East Pittsburgh.

The Mellons’ fingerprints are all over this crime. After the 1907 financial crisis they pushed out George Westinghouse and took a big slice of the electrical giant. Then the Mellons let the Westinghouse Corp. bleed to death for years until its remnants were bought by Siemens.

The gleaming skyscrapers of Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle” are matched by low wages.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Pittsburgh area’s 30,770 cashiers earned an average $8.69 per hour in 2008. The 43,240 local retail salespersons fared a little better—their average hourly wages were $11.60.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center employs 50,000 workers, five times the local employment of U.S. Steel. Health care workers in Pittsburgh earn less compared to almost any other Northern metropolitan area.

Exposing two big lies

Millions of workers throughout the U.S. have had their jobs stolen by big business. If a fired worker was fortunate to find a new job, it usually paid less than their old position.

A big lie used to divide poor and working people is to blame African Americans for the economic decline of cities like Detroit and Cleveland.

Pittsburgh’s 110,000 lost manufacturing jobs were taken from a city with a white majority. After World War II, the Mellons and their elected stooges made sure that Pittsburgh’s Black community grew the slowest of any in the North.

Pittsburgh also exposes the poisonous lie that “immigrants steal jobs.”

A century ago, when Pittsburgh was the steel capital of the world, one out of every four residents was born in another country. Deindustrialized Pittsburgh has today one of the smallest immigrant populations of any metropolitan area.

Just as the Mellons used “urban renewal” programs to tear down part of The Hill in Pittsburgh—a historic Black community—they’ve also kept the Latino/a community small as compared to other big cities in the North.

Fight for every job

The Mellons controlled a whole slew of industrial corporations and utilities. They’ve cut loose some of their former crown jewels. These included the Koppers Corp., a coke and chemical combine, and Carborundum, a big manufacturer of industrial abrasives.

The huge investment needed to automate not only kills manufacturing jobs. As Karl Marx showed, it also tends to lower the average rate of profit.

Even if a capitalist is getting more profits from a super-automated factory, these profits are probably going to be a lower percentage of the required increased investment.

Big capitalists try to break out of this cycle by reaping superprofits from wars and “defense” contracts.

They also cut their losses by axing outfits like Mesta Machine Works. Mesta was one of the world’s largest makers of steel mill equipment.

Even though Mesta was a Mellon outfit, the Mellon Bank foreclosed on it in February 1983. The 1,200 workers fired at Mesta’s Homestead, Pa., plant put up a struggle and finally got their back pay.

The following year Jesse Jackson won the Democratic primary in Homestead, a city that was 75 percent white.

Key to Jackson’s triumph was the support of two white union leaders: Ron Weisen, president of United Steelworkers Local 1371 and Darrell Becker, president of Shipbuilders Local 61. Fourteen hundred of these union members had been on strike against the Dravo Shipbuilding Corp. for seven months.

Steve Kirschbaum—a leader of Boston’s school bus drivers, members of United Steelworkers Local 8751—helped organize Jackson’s rally at Dravo’s picket lines. Gavrielle Gemma, currently an organizer for the Bail Out the People Movement, was on the platform with Jesse Jackson, representing Labor for Jackson.

Jesse Jackson told these strikers: “Mellon and the bankers have to stop investing in [then apartheid] South Africa and subsidizing slave labor. They’ve got to start investing in this steel valley of antiquated steel plants and shutdown plants. They owe it to you. If they refuse, you have the option of running them yourselves.” (Workers World, April 19, 1984)

The Rev. Jackson’s advice is still good today. It’s our plants and offices—not the Mellons’ or any other billionaire family’s.

Last of a series.

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